Joy of Spanish
Se lo dije…
We interrupt this column to bring you a special announcement on the use of the pronouns lo and le. Harry Allard, who sent me an e-mail last week asking about “beggars can’t be choosers” (which we successfully pegged as ¡limosnero con garrote!), has struck again with another e-mail asking which is better to use, lo or le. Mr. Allard seems to know he’s onto something because he qualifies his query by including the concept of “Mexican usage,” and he’s right because the peninsular usage in this case is indeed different from the Mexican and the Latin American usage in general.
But before answering Mr. Allard’s question, we need to know what we’re talking about. The words lo and le are pronouns, which means that they take the place of nouns. They first is a direct object pronouns, and the second, an indirect object pronoun. In Spanish they are called pronombres de complemento directo and pronombres de complemento indirecto, respectively. The masculine direct object pronouns are lo, los, la, and las, at least in third person.1 The first two are masculine, singular and plural respectively, and the last two are feminine, also singular and plural. The indirect object pronouns are le and les, singular and plural, regardless of gender. When in the third person an indirect object pronoun rubs up against a direct object pronoun (a “le lo” type situation), the le morphs into se and we end up with se lo, as in Se lo dije (“I told you so.”).
Let’s assume you want to say “I bought it” when “it” means a bicycle. “Bicycle” in Spanish is feminine: bicicleta. So you need to use the word la: La compré. If you bought a book, a libro, you’d have to say Lo compré. In the plural these would turn into Las compré and Los compré. If you bought these books for either “him” or “her,” you would say Le compré los libros, and if you want to substitute for both the direct and indirect object pronouns, you have to go morphing and use the word se, as in Se los compré. The pronoun se is always se, no matter if it refers to one, two or more people, animals, places, things, minerals, or Martian bacteria. (They haven’t found any of that yet, have they? If they do, please let me know).
Okay, so what’s the problem? The problem is that Spaniards tend to like to use le not only as an indirect object pronoun but also as a masculine direct object pronoun, usually when human beings are concerned (which kind of rules out the Martian bacteria). For example, many peninsular types will say No le he visto while American types will insist on No lo he visto, or even No lo vi (but that’s a whole other story; if anybody’s interested, let me know about that too). It is truly rare to hear a Mexican use le in the accusative case (which is what direct objects belonged to way back in the old, Roman, days). Some Spaniards get carried away and even use the le version of the direct object pronoun for women, which is really going out on a grammatical limb, even for the Spanish. But what’s worse, some madrileños are fond of using la, the feminine direct object pronoun, instead of le when we’re talking about indirect objects (dative case…; why did I have to take Latin in Junior High?).
Let’s look at a case in point before you get bored and turn to some other, more interesting reading on the internet. If you wanted to express, for example, that you “haven’t told her the truth,” you would most likely say No le he dicho la verdad. Some Spaniards, however, will say No la he dicho la verdad, which constitutes a clear-cut case of laísmo, and is frowned upon even in peninsular circles. Fortunately, this never happens in Mexico, where we pretty much have sorted out our direct and indirect object pronouns, and we’ve done so much better than the Spaniards. Where we get confused is with the direct object pronouns (lo, los, las, los) when preceeded by the indirect object pronoun se. As we’ve already seen, the pronoun se can either be singular or plural, depending on what you’re talking about. And if your direct object is in the masculine singular, for example, you should use a masculine singular pronoun: lo. But let’s assume you delivered one gift to many people. Grammar has it that you should say Se lo entregué [a ellos or a ustedes]. But most people feel that the sense of “pluralness” is missing because there is no “s” on the end of se, and they tend to tack this “s” onto the direct object pronoun, through no fault of its own, it being decidedly singular. This way they end up with Se los entregué. Bad Spanish, but extremely common in Mexico. The most common occurrence of the misunderstanding of the se is in the omnipresent phrase Se lo dije (“I told you so”), which magically and incorrectly turns into Se los dije when the speaker addresses more than one person. The literal translation would be “I told you it,” and that “it” is most definitely singular. The phrase should be exactly the same whether one is speaking to a single or a million listeners. This is very hard for most people to grasp without drawing a zillion charts and graphs, and even university professors have taken me up on it. C’est la vie.
But if your direct object pronoun is indeed plural, go right ahead and add an “s” on it: Se los compré, Se las compré. The problem arises when the direct object is singular and the indirect object is plural. Make sure the direct object remains singular in these cases: do not add a phantom “s” thinking that there’s got to be a plural somewhere. It is there, in the se, only it’s invisible, sort of like the Martian bacteria.
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